thecages

Every now and again The Register spits out a gem like this one.

At long last, Sun Microsystems will fire up its retail grid computing service and give any US customer access to a supercomputer class system.

Casual Sun observers will be scratching their heads right about now, believing that Sun had already announced such a service a long time ago. That's correct.

Sun first "launched" its $1 per CPU hour plan in September 2004. [Their] plans revolved around the idea that any company could pop onto a web site, enter a credit card number and then access as many CPUs as they needed.

Sun has spent the last 18 months trying to make this happen. First, it battled the basic logistics behind creating a massive publicly accessible cluster, then it battled the government. Regulators didn't care for the idea that rogue nations could log on to the Sun cluster and design nuclear weapons or run dirty bomb simulations in their spare time.

It seems unlikely that an Axis of Evil member would want to leave such an obvious trail of their activities, including their Visa account, in the hands of Sun and its three-letter friends. But, hey, everyone likes frequent flier miles.

Sun has managed to assuage the government's fears by making the initial Sun grid a US thang only.

So by limiting access to nuke-type computing power to Southern Rednecks like Timbo McVeigh everything will be hunky dory - phew!